By Jessyka Albert
When I first arrived at Boulder Church as a bright-eyed intern, I was given the title of “young adult pastor.” This, I thought, would be great for many reasons. First of all, I am a young adult! Secondly, I had just spent three years of my life working at Campus Ministries at Union College. Young adult ministry in Boulder would be a walk in the park.
It didn’t take long before I came to terms with the fact that young adult ministry on an Adventist campus and young adult ministry in the “real world” are drastically different. Life’s challenges complicate young adult community in the real world.
At Union College, everyone is roughly the same age, faces the same basic life struggles (for example, trying to avoid buying overpriced textbooks and dreading a big final next Tuesday), lives within a ten-minute walk of one another, and receives worship credit for attending spiritual programs like Friday night vespers.
At Boulder, and likely at your church as well, many of the factors that make young adult ministry on a college campus work well are nonexistent. I realized that my ideas of how to connect people my own age to church and to Jesus would needed to be reevaluated.
To begin my journey of reconstructing my definition of “young adult ministry,” I posed a question to a few of the eighteen to twenty-somethings at church. “What do you guys want out of church?” I asked. The answer I received seemed too simple. “We would love to have potluck every week,” someone said, almost jokingly. Everyone laughed, but when I immediately agreed, the joke became a plan. Starting with the following Sabbath, the young adult group began to have lunch together every single week. Lunch together became a springboard into deeper community; leading to afternoon hikes, rock climbing trips, and days spent flying kites at the park, throwing frisbees, and drinking La Croix. On some Sabbaths, the afternoons together led to dinner. Dinners led to evenings spent playing board games and discussing life—its joys, sorrows, troubles, and triumphs.
Before we knew it, the young adult group not only began spending nearly all of every Saturday with each other, but began to grow. We began to connect on a deep level, getting to know about each others’ jobs, classes, families, friends, and hobbies. Time spent together outside of the physical church building connected us more than just two or three hours in the worship service and Sabbath classes ever could. Some of our deepest conversations about life and about God were had over lunch, during a board game, or while on a hike. Furthermore, anytime someone new visited our church, there was no doubt that we would have a way to connect. Lunch would be planned and ready. It was a given.
As the framework for this new definition of young adult ministry began to develop, I noticed that we weren’t cornering the market on an exclusive “young adult ministry;” we were just doing plain old ministry. At Union College, “ministry” almost exclusively meant programing. Relying on programming alone works well in the collegiate environment because socioeconomically similar people are already connected to one another. Students eat in the same cafeteria, attend the same classes, and live in the same dorms.
Unfortunately, all too often our tendency is to simply pack up the collegiate model and roll it out at the local church or in the conference while disregarding the reality that it may not be the best model for reaching young people in the “real world.” We plan event after event for twenty- something-year-olds and are shocked when these events are not well attended, or when people come and go but never really connect. I am not against good programming. In fact, in February 2018, a group of young adults from Boulder Church attended the final One project gathering in San Diego. However, I want to be clear that it was more than the stand-alone event that made the experience incredible. While the event included time to connect with Jesus and with each other, the young adults also traveled with one another, ate meals with new people in new places, and explored San Diego while experiencing life with one another. If you take away one thing at this juncture, take this: programs can be wonderful, but they are not effective on their own.
Chances are you’ve heard someone say, “There are no young people in our church. They’re all leaving!” Or, maybe you’ve said it yourself. The harsh reality is this: if all church is giving a young person is programming, they’re not miss- ing out if they just livestream the service or vespers from home while in their PJs flipping pancakes and drinking coffee (take it from a young person who may or may not have done this a few times). We have more to offer as a church, young and old, than just a service or an evangelistic series. We have more to offer as a church than “young adult” or “youth” events. We have more and we can be more. By no means does this mean we stop any of these things, but it does mean that they don’t deserve 100 percent of our time, energy, and finances.
Recently, a popular rap artist by the name of Drake took his music video budget for “God’s Plan” (nearly one million dollars), and gave it all away. What if our church organization took Drake’s lead and used our finances to invest in people instead of in events? For Drake, what would have been just another good music video instead changed dozens of lives. For us, what would be just another decent event could instead be an investment into connections with dozens of our young adults. It’s time to reevaluate our method of ministry and revisit our budgets. We talk about the exodus of young people enough; let’s do something instead. I’ll say it one more time: our church shouldn’t cut programming or stop hosting events all together. We must simply understand that these things are only a small portion of a bigger picture.
Our young people are not dead, disappearing, or on Mars. Our young people are not giving up on Jesus or on church. The simple truth is that our young people have graduated from college and are finding themselves in a new phase of the journey, that’s all. They’re juggling work, relationships, families, and taxes. The simple truth is that we are not adapting our ministry to their needs.
Let’s not continue to give them only program after program to juggle and fit into their calendars. Let’s give them churches that are warm, empathetic, and meaningful wherein they feel welcomed and know that they can connect on a weekly basis. Let’s give them friendships that flood into their day-to-day lives. Let’s give them Sabbath classes that look deeply into Scripture and are relevant to their lives. Let’s give them challenges to live their faith every day and in every situation. Let’s give them Jesus. Remember Him? The guy who who walked, traveled, ate, and celebrated with people. Let’s give them the Jesus who lived life and was life.
It’s been almost three years now that I’ve been at Boulder Church. My job description has changed from young adults to kids and teens. I haven’t organized a single “young adult” event in ages, but I have seen measurable growth in my church. One recent Saturday, I spent all day with a group of young adults from Boulder processing the Sabbath’s sermon over enchiladas, dreaming up ministry ideas over board games, and discussing current events after a movie. We need to remind ourselves that young adult ministry, or any ministry for that matter, can sometimes be, quite literally, a walk in the park.
–Jessyka Albert is associate pastor at Boulder Adventist Church. Email her at: [email protected].